Social Crime Prevention in South Africa ' s Major Cities

After the Second World War, the international trend in crime prevention was to address crime through the criminal justice system, which typically included a combination of vigorous policing, and a 'tough' justice system. This was based on an individualistic approach to crime prevention, which assumed that individual motivation plays an important role in the decision to commit a crime (Travis and Weisburd, 1997). Crime was seen to be a product of particular individuals, and the model of what kind of individual committed crime was largely deduced from those that were incarcerated (Robert, 1989). Given that crime was seen as a problem of particular individuals, who lacked moral integrity, the envisaged solution was to ensure that such people were incarcerated for as long as possible, to protect society from those who did adhere to social norms (Garland 1996).